Well, I'm back from Florida and a little toasty and tired. We drove 13 hours to Fernandina Beach and our condo on the beach. So we spent the first day collapsed and sleeping. The second day we were still worn out, plus My Wife wanted to go into the heart of the old city and shop. So we did. Their post office was built in 1900 and is quite a cool building. We didn't get to hit the beach that day. Instead, she bought herself a gold sand dollar necklace and I bought her a gold bucket and shovel necklace for our wedding anniversary.
The next several days it rained on us. We walked the beach in the pouring rain. My Honey found several treasures. I found some of my own.
The rain kept wrecking our beach plans, with us all sunscreened up and settling down in our chairs just in time for the rain to start. So on Thursday and Friday when the sun came out we ignored our own better judgement and stayed out for as long as we could stand.
Now, of course, we are burned, but it doesn't so much matter because we had to drive home on Saturday anyway. We debated about detouring into Savannah and taking a look around, but decided that with 13 hours ahead of us perhaps we should save that trip for some other time. And that was too bad, because Alexis Norton visited my blog from Savannah while I was down there in her neck of the woods. Perhaps I might have run into her without even knowing who she was? Probably not, but it's fun to think so. And just in case you're wondering, no, we did not skip Savannah out of fear that the former Miss Savannah who shot her boyfriend might be there PMSing with a gun. She never even crossed my mind.
When we got home it was midnight and we didn't even feel like unloading the car. We collapsed into bed.
In the morning, My Wife called her mom, to tell her about our adventures (as you can tell from this blog, they were not very adventurous.) Her mother informed her that her beautiful cousin, Sarah, is in very serious condition. I was thinking about Sarah, along with several others, when I blogged that if I could do just one of Jesus' miracles it would be healing (I was going to make a separate post about Sarah, but I seem to be writing it now.)
Sarah was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She's only 27, but her pap smears haven't been quite normal for several years. Finally, they scheduled her for surgery to do a biopsy. That was 2 weeks ago. They told her that her second surgery would be a month after, once they had the results from the biopsies and knew just what had to be removed and how severe her situation was.
Her situation is lethal. Everything has to come out. She's 27 and facing a total hysterectomy, which she already knew was possible. But after the tests they say Sarah may be too far gone to save at all. The cancer has spread. It may be in her lymph nodes. They will find out when they do her hysterectomy. She will go from the hysterectomy straight into chemo. And she may die anyway.
Sarah was handling this as well as she could just prior to the first surgery. Then they jerked her around on the scheduling and which doctor would do it. It threw her for a loop and took all her focus away. She fought to have her doctor, as she had been promised, and finally won out. But the unexpected curveball knocked Sarah's focus and left her emotionally devastated prior to the first surgery. It was bad enough knowing that she was going to be cut open twice in a month and would probably be getting a hysterectomy after having just finished pharmacy school and not yet been married or had children. But then the hospital hit her with the unexpected. She fell apart. After the surgery they have hit her with the worst possible news. She may be unsavable. I don't know her condition now, but I don't expect that it's good.
Brighton/Trish, I know you want to have insurance before you have your surgery, but I'm telling you, please don't wait. Get the money from somewhere and get the surgery done right now. You can NOT afford to put this off. Please don't risk your life if you can possibly avoid it. Please don't wait.
Every time I see a pink ribbon for breast cancer it irritates me. There is so much money being poured into breast cancer research while less than one tenth of that is going for research into prostate cancer, which aflicts over twice as many men as breast cancer does women. And now I find out that cervical cancer kills more women than breast cancer and may be about to kill a relative that I had just met a few years ago. If it bothered me before, it bothers me even more now. Sarah is a really nice girl. And yet not a single one of those pink ribbons is for her.
Anyway, I'm not going to climb on a soapbox right now. I just want to ask if you pray, would you pray for Sarah? We still don't know if it has spread to her lymph nodes, but they say it is likely.
As I was catching up on my emails, which has taken 2 days and still I'm not finished (Netscape suddenly went straight to hell and won't let me reply) I noticed an email from Ian's wife, Diane. Ian is dying from a brain tumor. Diane said Ian has stopped eating and sleeps all the time now. He can't swallow anymore. She says he is almost certain to die at this point. He is expected to be gone before this week is done. There is nothing anyone can do. Barring a miracle from God it will all be over and Diane and Ian's 5 children will be left without him. His parents aren't exactly taking this well, either. But of course it's hard to take something like this well.
Last night My Little Redneck Town had a million dollar fireworks show in the park. We are too tired and sunburned to walk the 2 miles to the park to see it, but we can see most of it from our street in front of our house anyway. So we pulled our chairs out and sat there in the street next to the curb, just as most of our neighbors did, watching fireworks from in front of our own houses. My drunken neighbor, Rooster, reminded us of why we don't do this more often and why we must move from here. Rooster was drunk off his ass and wanted to 'converse' with everyone. Unfortunately, his conversation skills were impaired and he was more like a mentally handicapped child than an adult. With each rocket Rooster shouted, "I like it I like it I like it! Hell yeah!" Apparently he expected the rest of us to join him in shouting this. But no one did. So, as rotten drunks are prone to do, he got mad. By the end of the fireworks Rooster was shouting at us, "Fuck you! Fuck you all! Fuck all 'a ya!" He was too drunk to get out of the chair, so as we all picked up our chairs and went inside Rooster just sat like a ragdoll, flapping his arms around and cursing at the air. He couldn't get up.
I don't know how long he stayed there, sitting drunk in his chair in the street, but he was still there when I locked up before bed.
Rooster
And that, unfortunately, has been my return from Florida.
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